Describing my most memorable vacation is hard because I’d have to pick between my childhood and taking vacations with partners. To say that there isn’t a story that takes the cake is incorrect. Here is the story of the first time I got married. I hope I made it sound as funny and terrible as it really was……… we just needed health insurance….. famous last words of all couples who have been together for a while and say “what the hell?” The only reason you get a link to this entry is that you *really* couldn’t find it unless you were dedicated to swallowing Stories whole. I posted it for the first time on Clever Title in 2005.
With others, there are snippets, like having fried dill pickles at BB King’s in Memphis with my family. It’s something that is commonplace today, but they blew my little kid mind. I also remember having bright yellow lemon ice cream on Beale Street, as cool and refreshing in my mind today as it was 30 odd years ago.
I remember coffee at Cafe du Monde, like everyone does, but I’m not sure all people think it should be a religion. All things being equal, I think Bryn and I could live in New Orleans quite easily. I should ask her. Moving isn’t a thing with me anymore because I’ve realized I’m using the Internet wrong. I can totally get a house in New Orleans for two weeks or a month via Air BnB.
I’m never talking about moving permanently, because I have friends that have worked at oil companies for longer than I’ve been alive who’ve lived all over the world for a few months at a time. For instance, I wouldn’t want to get a hotel and rent a car in Helsinki. I’d want to put down roots and make home base, even i it was only ten days……. keeping in mind that I have absolutely no idea how to make friends in Finland because everyone is like me. None of them want to be here, either.
It’s only a shell, though. I’ve watched so many videos of people moving to Helsinki (it’s *fascinating* when they’re POC). Finns are the nicest, kindest, sweetest people and also gaurded af if they don’t know you. Same. Hilarity ensues.
Helsinki is a vacation I want to take, though, and not a memorable one from the past.
Again, I’m not sure my “wedding” could beat anything I’d write today. It’s Saturday morning, and I’m trying to figure out how to use Threads effectively (and by that I mean I’m doomscrolling and need to eat).
I have come to a turning point in my healing. It’s going to sound harsh, but I mean it in the best way. I’ve had enough clinical separation that now both my beautiful girl and her man are the characters they’ve been in my head all along. They are very real, and yet very not. I cannot have them, but I can have the memories attached to them. I have every emotion I have seen come through my Supergrover for ten years. She is an uploaded consciousness, and now there is Silence in the Library.
Hey. Who turned out the lights?
God, it would be good if I were the sort of person that could end on a line like that. Just MIC DROP. I can’t say it any better……. AND YET I’M NOT DONE TALKING. 😛
The only part that’s sad is she chose this for herself, and I let her. It was time if we weren’t moving forward, and I am sure that she doesn’t see my point and she doesn’t see that I do see hers, and I’m willing to accommodate it and I always have. She’s been holding out on me and saying there’s nothing wrong. I don’t have to live with that, and I won’t. There is a very good reason I’m all in with her, it’s just too personal to tell the whole world, because it only belongs to the two of us. Even if it’s something we’ve told ourselves or others, our reactions to it are our own and should have come with beer.
Oh, wait. It did, one night. We celebrated my divorce virtually with beer. By that time, there was no conflict. I was just glad the marriage was over and she was glad for me. There was really no turning back, and we both knew it. She just didn’t pick up the extent of it because all she saw was me spiraling out in teenage blushing madness and not the very real possibility that we’d actually need each other.
My mother is dead, and so are all three of my grandmothers. It’s just one of the reasons I needed her- that loss of female energy all around me. I hope I gave her more than she told me I did, but even if she never does, I have my guesses…. And have to try to stuff down the automatic reaction that it’s probably bullshit according to her. I lost my sense of up and down, the feeling in all relationships as to whether open and closed door personalities matter.
It would have been ridiculous to dump someone that close to me if her marrying a man was my issue. It’s not, and it won’t ever be. It’s that it changed her identity in such a fundamental way that I realized just how much had been going on in her life that she just neglected to mention. She wasn’t purposefully hiding anything, she was protective of herself and unwilling to let go on the off chance that there would be more devastation emotionally. I understand all of that. Our differences come in where I was absolutely lionhearted in my belief that I could just invite her to do something and the spell would be broken for both of us. We’d become real people, and not even the people we used to be to each other.
It has not escaped my attention that I got shut down when I asked her for any attention at all. Those two things together told me that she might love me, but she was never going to actually commit to talking, she was never going to actually commit to anything because if she was, she would have by now. She would have seen my dreams and said “that sounds cool. I will totally come visit you.” She danced around everything, his Ginger Rogers and my Fred Astaire (I couldn’t lead at gunpoint, so if she can’t, either, we’re fucked up now. I would find it devastatingly hard to believe she does not know how to lead.
I pictured coffee with both of them at different times, letting my characters play. With him, I joked to her that he’d be all “wake up, loser.” But what I meant was being that person that I could look at with one glance and tell how Supergrover was maintaining. She’s a handful, and he’s capable. I would never put him before her- that’s not what women friendship does. But don’t think I can’t tell how Lindsay’s doing just by looking at Matt.
I’m betting they have about the same Starbucks tab as well, which I’m sure is extraordinarily healthy for both of them.
Again, letting them be characters is like the show at the end of “Dawson’s Creek.” OMFG. I’m going to cry. I’ve been Dawson at the end for ten years. Happy for Pacey and Joey, glad to be along for the ride, and eventually did his own thing just to get some distance….. where Pacey and Joey were the stars of the show. My God.
They became his characters, we just work in different mediums. If my characters are playing right now, they’re watching Dawson’s Creek and telling me I got something right, but they’ll never admit it.
It’s healing to be able to walk away while treating myself. I can’t treat myself with drugs, but I can certainly spend more than an hour a week on self-improvement. Pro Tip: Therapy doesn’t work without homework.
Here’s the writing prompt that got me started on the whole healing journey in 2003.
My mother never……………
I don’t remember the whole thing, and it’s gone now (I think). It’s from Clever Title. I wrote:
My mother never found herself. She stood behind a black robe, one after the other. (Her partner once my parents divorced was a judge, and my dad was a minister, which worked very well in this piece.) I talked about how she changed things bit by bit, like adding spices to a soup, but not enough to alter the flavor significantly. This is because I thought she cared wayyyyyy too damn much what other people thought, and I didn’t for the life of me want to be her. My mother was a gracious, loving woman crippled by so much fear of not being the perfect family that we all struggled to be that for her.
It was the start of realizing I could have an opinion, because no one else ever held back on us. Then, she died, without ever realizing how big the world could get when you actualize….. when you step into yourself.
She cooked her husband dinner every night and deferred to all his opinions, which weren’t bad but definitely more conservative than mine. I was actually close to one of his daughters, because she was chair of Mexican Studies at UTSA before she died and we were both geeked out over Tony Mendez….. and she was geeked out over me, and who doesn’t like people who think they’re amazing?
If it seems like that is extraordinarily harsh, it is a direct line to my personality. The one that hurts for everyone else. The one that wants everything to give to everyone else. My mother was like that to her core, built for it, and so am I. But when the person who is helping doesn’t have somewhere to go with their feelings, they resent all the people they care for who aren’t stepping up. That’s because I have been so reticent to express any needs at all that if you wanted to help me, you couldn’t.
So, for the first time in my life, I reached out to someone for help. It was the most embarrassing thing I’d ever done, because I reached out to someone who said “why do you expect everyone to fix you?” What I should have said is that I spend most nights thinking about your issues, where’s your five minutes for mine if I don’t make you pay attention for 300 seconds in a row?”
What I actually said was…….. nothing.
It was the right move and it helped me, but it didn’t help me get rid of all the bitterness and resentment because she could justify her emotional unavailability. What ruined my relationship with her was ultimately my relationship with Jesus, because my faith teaches me that we have to own the forgiveness of sins. Remission is right out.
This is because the remission of sin is their erasure. It’s sweeping it under the rug and pretending it didn’t happen. Forgiveness is saying you’re wrong, saying your’re sorry, and letting scar tissue heal over.
We had a remission/forgiveness debate and she lost, because remission wasn’t acceptable. She wasn’t growing with me, she was fighting me. I was regressing. Like I said, mutually assured destruction because she’d pop off with the same tired crap and I’d fall for it every time, escalation mode engaged. The one time I did come out of a fight like that clear headed, I was dumb enough to go back for more. It’s not because she’s a bad person. I just should have realized that if there was going to be a pattern change, it was on her, because I’d already spent eight years doing our work for me. Relationships grow and change and tumble and climb. What got to me was being able to say emotions and not hear them. She would probably say that my ears were clogged, but in the last eight years if I’d been deep diving into something, she wouldn’t say I had a point there, either.
That’s because if I bring up the past, she’ll say there’s nothing she can do about it. She’ll say she’s not a perfect person, but she won’t say “I’m sorry.” There’s no acknowledgement that talking is a good thing.
If she really wanted to put the fear of God in me, she would have texted “we need to talk.”
Although the last really funny exchange we had was that she told me it was interesting the kinds of people I talked to on the Internet, and I said, “many women before you have taught me to be wary when they say “it’s just interesting.” 😛 When I made her laugh all my feelings spilled out. She just does that to me. If she gets tickled, I’m not far behind and vice versa.
Speaking of which, she actually still owes me some work product. A 12 page report with graphs and color glossy pictures, if I recall correctly. I mean, she did send me the bullet points, so I think I’ve got it, but concentration is key.
If you know that reference, you are REALLY an OG. All I have to say to that is “well, I guess I owe her a report, too. My graph will just ride on more metrics.“
One of the things that we talked about that’s really stuck with me is the idea of the complicated construct. We are both forceful when we need to be, Southern when we don’t. Neither of us see gender in us as much as we see gender on us, because again, she’s been a boss for a long time. Her patois reads male, her voice…… music…. and I don’t think she’d phrase it that way, but I’m the reader. If I were to challenge her as a writer, I’d ask her to write a love letter to a person, place, or thing. I don’t think people ask her to do that very often, and it’s counter to her nature.
If turnabout was fair play, it would be a task list with two things on it.
WHY GOD, WHY?
I’m just feeling good that I can laugh and be out with it. All the feelings. All the love. All the anger. All the tears.
Things are going well, because I am healing through getting to know my own version of my characters, because even though they’re based on real people, they’re not exact because they can’t be.
“You want me to write accurately about your vibe? Show it to me. Put up or shut up. Not looking for an invitation, but not looking to be punished over what I don’t know, either.”
If there’s any anger that will stay, it’s that the line above didn’t do a damn thing to change our dynamic, so I knew it ultimately wouldn’t.
I suppose I’m rattling on because it’s twofold. She’s not listening, so I need to hear me. Also, these entries won’t mean anything in a few months. Then, it’ll be another ten years and I’ll be sobbing in reminiscence.
The only subject I am comfortable projecting authority is me, and you would find it amazing the sheer number of people who want to revoke my degree. It is my work not to take their opinions seriously, because they simply have not spent as much time with the subject as I have. Totally nuts, completely self aware, trying to put herself back together. That’s the elevator pitch, I guess. The “completely nuts” will never go away. It just has to be managed, and admittedly it’s not such a great time right now, but it is getting better.
I feel like I lost my shit yesterday, I was so blindsided by a wave of grief I didn’t see coming. Everything I’d ever done to offend anyone was beating down on me, so of course not only did I ruin my beautiful girl’s life, but because I didn’t know she had a boyfriend/husband, I couldn’t freak out about those implications, but I did yesterday because I was berating myself for a hundred percent of everything. Yes, she was a total jerk to me, but I felt that way after not being heard on the same issue for years and then being told that it was tiresome to hear about said issue. It would have been good to know that subject was tired because I thought she hadn’t read it. So much information was lost between keyboard and chair.
And that’s what I’m thinking about. All the thoughts between us that didn’t get expressed and now need to find a box for safekeeping. In allowing myself to get that angry, that upset, I realized what a mess I had created by assuming everything was fine, writing everything exactly the way I always did.
It wasn’t fine. I didn’t start talking to her any differently, same cadence, same tone, same temperature, some everything except the reaction my words would create. I tried too hard, and it came across as trying to get attention, when in reality I was just grieving a loss and hoping I was wrong… that I’d be found.
I’m not upset that she cannot forgive me in the way that I would like to be forgiven. That is not my call. I am frustrated that it took so very long to reach the same conclusion we would have had, anyway.
Or maybe I’m just being hard on myself, because looking at her words, I still cannot find a clear path. I am just going to have to chalk it up to the nature of the Internet.
When I am not looking at her words, I recognize others’ footfalls and get in line. The path that I’m creating is walking away from her indecision, because not knowing whether I was welcome or not made me walk on eggshells a hundred percent of the time while apologizing for my existence.
I could talk about anything with her except her…. which made me in the unenviable position of having to ask myself what to say, which was invariably wrong.
She’s right. It was a hundred percent clear I wasn’t getting what I wanted, because she didn’t want to answer anything, ever, at all. It didn’t make any sense, because she liked talking about my dating life, my mental health, my cooking, my career, etc. She felt free to tell me anything she wanted to about anyone in my life, but got pissed off if I said anything about anyone in hers. When I hurt her, I set up the double standard that she could be as close to me as she wanted, and also to be angry that I wanted to know things.
She could pick apart my dates, and I didn’t even know she was with anyone officially, because she told me she was seeing someone and then never mentioned him again. I am glad that I just assumed it all worked out, because it did.
Now I’m getting tired of the story in my head and wish it would leave me alone. I’m getting the distance I need to be free, and it feels like I’m tripping into the light. It wouldn’t be me if I didn’t.
The story in my head is bigger than me and has to stop adding layers. Enough is enough. I just think I’m done and then another wave hits me.
That’s because during the original break, I never really gave myself enough time to pick out the shrapnel before I started apologizing. This time, it’s been months because something happened this time that didn’t happen before. My faith in her is broken. Hers in me had broken long beforehand, it’s just that she was polite and I was blind.
We just don’t fit anymore, and it was a mistake to think that with time, everything would look better.
I’m joking because of course the writing prompt made me laugh. “This is a family show” is how I generally reply when someone posts something on my Facebook wall that I know my mom and dad would have *loved.* If I could think of an example off the top of my head, I would gladly embarrass the people who said such things, because it wouldn’t be mean. It would just be turnabout as fair play. Your mom probably doesn’t want to know what I think of your rack.
Here’s my actual “fuck off” for the day. It has nothing to do with romance, but definitely fallout……………… Your dad absolutely wants to know what I think of your rack. In 2002, my wife’s best friend’s dad asked me to kiss my wife in front of him for reasons. At a party, in a bar, in front of everyone.
It’s actually the biggest reason I was scared that my Internet friend would tell her boyfriend/husband about me. I couldn’t protect her from what he would think/say, and I have no illusions as to how that conversation might have gone. Him taking me as a serious threat was never a fear for me, because I wasn’t. My biggest fear is that I would become a running joke with her husband because he thought it was funny. Every passive and not so passive joke available, that kind of thing. I do not know if anything like this happened, and I don’t think it did, really. I’ve just been through it before, and I’m betting she hasn’t. I’m sure I screwed up more for her than I can possibly imagine, but I’m not acting as if I already have. That’s giving myself a lot of unnecessary punishment, and I’ve lived like a monk for eight years in part because I thought I deserved it. I’m not saying he’s a bad guy, I am saying he is one of a species known for making jokes like that. I cannot know he’s not like that, I can only compare him to all the other men I’ve met and say it’s a probability like everything else. Maybe the percentage is high, maybe it’s low. It doesn’t matter, because no one would tell me something like that.
I hope he’s the kind of man I need him to be, and if he’s not, I hope he lays off eventually. There really is no limit to how cruel it could have gotten for her, and I thank God they’ve met. It’s not like she picked him up off the street when he fell off a turnip truck.
I do not wonder whether he’s better for her than I am, because I already have both my answers. The fact of the matter is that he is both better for her and it doesn’t matter, because there’s no changing either one of us. I’m not male and she’s not queer…. not only that, if I had been male, she would have seen the threat coming and disposed of it. I know this because I felt threatened and I disposed of her friendship first. I told her that I couldn’t be friends with a woman that excited me this much and stay married.
I knew what was going to happen and she didn’t.
Here’s what made everything go sideways. Whether it is true or not, I thought she needed me. Whether it’s my own mixed up mood and behavior or what she was actually saying, I thought she was inviting me to be a part of something bigger than myself, and it was worth the turmoil in my marriage to be that for her.
I am positive that in some ways, she feels responsible for my divorce, even though I have told her all day, every day that she’s not. That I chose her in some ways, in was an inevitability in others.What I do know for sure is that if the stars had aligned, we wouldn’t have been together very long. I’m Type B. She is…………….. not.
So, my perfect picture of romance is generally people who recognize relaxing together and talking about our feelings as productive. Relationships have problems, and ignoring them only kicks the can down the road. I can’t help but think that if we’d ever met, her husband and I would have been perfect for each other also, because we have more in common than we don’t in terms of being that support team.
The most romantic thing my beautiful girl could have done for me is to introduce me to her husband, because we love our girl. Period. If she’s in trouble, we will come. He just has to drive. 😉
That’s an old joke, too. I have vision issues, so I choose to take public transportation. I’ve said that before, but I’ve gotten a lot of new influx, so maybe catch people up a little. So, the idea that if my girl is in trouble he’s just the wheels is ridiculously funny. He’s a moose. I’m a squirrel.
You have seen this cliched high school movie a thousand times. I don’t care if her boyfriend is a big jock. That position has been filled. I don’t want to be Freddie Prinze, Jr. in every ’90s movie. I LIKE HER WITH HER GLASSES ON, OK? To me, you don’t really love someone until you love them at the beginning of the movie and not after the glam makeover. Believe me, that’s not her husband’s vibe, either. I’m just pointing out that I am perfectly fine with him getting all the actual romance, because I’m not trying to be Jamie or Roy. I’m Keeley, and she’s Rebecca.
Oh my God that is so apt it hurts.
To me, I couldn’t have any more romance than I’d need in my life if I had a friendship like that, and not because I’m not looking for it. I mean while I’m waiting, I do not see myself as lacking in love. I do not fall into the trap of feeling lonely, because even though the relationship is virtual, it rests in my heart and mind. It is the other half of me, and because of it, I’m not sure that either one of us is individuated in the smallest of ways. We’re not a separate person because we have never been that to each other. We’ve always been inner voices, because we’ve never made the effort to hear each other out loud. I mean, we have.
We’ve sent each other voice messages over the years because it was exciting or faster or both. Her accent has a lovely lilt on some words, mine on others. She has a queer sister, and I joked that I almost wanted to hear her talk more, because it would be like one of those baby gradients…. her accent, my sexual orientation. 😛
(Queer sister is unavailable and boy, are you guys sick and twisted. Abssolutelyfuckingnot. It would be like wanting an Oreo and getting a Hydrox and pretending they’re the same thing. Queer sister is an Oreo for someone else. She would only be my Hydrox, and no amount of devotion would fix it. At least if I was missing she’d know where I’d be. In her brother-in-law’s car. 😛
Getting my priorities straight is a big damn problem. I have been relieved of all my rights and responsibilities, and yet my mind hasn’t changed pathways to stop my feral nature. I’m not sure anything could be done to stop hers, either. I have a feeling that thinking I’m worth nothing comes from my own echo chamber, not what she was actually saying, but I don’t know what she was actually saying. I figured if I got that exhausted trying to figure it out, I just wasn’t going to. If I was a priority, nothing would stop her from letting me know that. When I said, “love me the way I love you,” it doesn’t mean that I was mad she couldn’t commit to me like a partner. I was mad that I wasn’t a high enough priority to shit or get off the pot, or to even let me know where the signposts were on the map. I am never going to get it if you’re wandering around in unfamiliar territory, so am I, and we’re not working from the same map.
She did not owe me any justification of her energy or time, I just felt frustrated that she felt justified in wanting my love and care, but stopped letting me know that she wanted it. The confusing part came from shutting down and opening up, It was a cycle for which I could not prepare or make stable because once I hurt her, nothing was ever the same.
She will carry fear of me forever, and it won’t stop the good memories from coming, but it will stop her from trusting me until we’re dead. She can say she trusts me, but her actions don’t line up. In a lot of ways, I got her out of mine, because she was asking me to be less. Be less of a writer, because I don’t think you have enough dexterity with words to keep me unidentified. That every bread crumb was an assault. If they are direct hits and I am that stupid, I hope someone will let me know, because here’s what even she wouldn’t have accepted. I would burn down the whole world if I thought she needed it. Fuck this blog. I’m not that good a writer. She is the only person I want in the world more than this. I have appreciated her willingness to grin and bear it over the years.
It’s just for me to tell where I am and where I’m going. We could have worked together, she just wouldn’t show up to the group project. We got an F due to lack of effort. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe because she’s not taking this seriously, maybe because she doesn’t want me to jump in knowing she’s made it impossible for me not to feel that way about her.
I’m all like “have you read any novel ever?” 😛
This is because she’s novel AF.
Novel Jesus smiled upon me. I would have loved capers that involved me setting ’em down, her picking them up like clockwork. I picture Mme Precious Ramotswe and her secretary, the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and the Kalahari Typing School for Men.
I would teach the hell out of typing.
So would she. She’s mastered the art of typing on her phone. I have not. How she sends me e-mails without typos or spelling mistakes while also on the go is disturbing on so many levels, mostly that I couldn’t do it if you paid me. I’m one of those people that if I was on my phone, I would get a paragraph and she’d get “ok.” Come to think of it, that might have been a good solution to the problem of me saying too much. “Leslie, if you don’t stop talking, I am going to throw your keyboard off this train” would have been very effective. 😛
She can do sportsball, so now I am picturing us sitting on the train together and watching my keyboard thrown from our seats, perfectly hitting the trash can at Metro Center.
I think we both use the Internet to show people how smart we are, and that’s how we got absolutely wasted on each other’s brain chemicals. We were trying to impress each other, and it worked. She’s an amazing writer, funny af. She manages to convey her actual voice in punctuation, and I think about her cadence more than her actual words. They hit very, very hard whether I’m laughing or sobbing. I got so tired of rain, and frustrated and butt hurt and all the things. I really screwed myself, because I didn’t see that hurting her would result in me carrying around a lot of feelings I wouldn’t have wished on myself in retrospect, because I had no idea how much it would affect my future. It will never be what it once was, I assure you.
It’s a lot to carry even now. It is devastating that our conflict was really “the stuff you’re telling me is hard, but worth it if you’ll support me” vs. “I hate that you’ve told me this because you never forget to tell me what a burden I am to you.” That’s the root cause of every issue we’ve ever had, and I think she would agree, because we’ve both planted stories in each other that would make us feel that way. Our conflict with each other is the same from opposite ends of the spectrum. I just couldn’t express that love coming forward because she was only seeing the need going backward. I wasn’t telling her that she was a burden, I was telling her that I needed to hear more of her burdens in order to feel needed, and if she didn’t want that from me, please don’t give me false hope that will change. I want and need her in my life so bad it physically hurts, but not at the cost of giving too much and getting too little. It makes me feel like crap.
I am so much more than she thinks I am in the best way possible. She thought I was too much in a bad way. I thought she was too much in a good way, which made me fluctuate between elation and frustration. Because I hurt her, it felt like she was punishing me for the things I said to try and get her to open up like I was supposed to know whether I could say those things or not. Then even her responses were cagey, and I knew why. She thought she was burdening me with information, I thought it was really hard to be in a situation where she was emotionally unavailable and annoyed at me having feelings. It is absolutely okay for her to be that……………….. for other people. I told her that she obviously had friends she needed more than me, and it was time to let her go find them, because I was tired of up and down, hot and cold, feeling like a child being punished because I wanted more than she could give and she was a jerk about it. It bothered me that she cared so much and didn’t want to talk about it. It bothered me that she couldn’t tell me what she wanted from me, and if it was nothing, stop writing to me so that I can move past the kind of bond that I want and you don’t. I doubt she calls up old exes, and because she brought up those feelings in me and not in herself, I don’t think she realized how things would play out with me. That I’d feel at times that I was being forced into dealing with my feelings about her a lot more of the time than I could afford to spend. I had to manage my feelings not spiraling out of control because every time I went on a date, I felt like I was cheating on her, because she wouldn’t have cared if I slept with anyone. She would have cared at onboarding, and she worried too much about it. I can’t imagine how much it would have meant to both of us to have this conversation in person. I would have liked to hug her while I told her she was amazing.
That’s because overexplaining is a trauma response. I spent a lot of time wrapped up in how much someone new could have of me as well. A .01 percent of me will be polyamorous until I die, because I don’t have to be romantic with her to juggle what real love is. Real love is work. A lot of it. She asked me to forget an impossible amount of shit. I’m just sitting in it until I can. I am thinking these thoughts, and they aren’t going to the right person. That doesn’t matter, either. I need a roadmap on how to fall in love again. I need someone to drag me into it kicking and screaming. I need someone to fight through all the defenses I’ve put up, because I’ll never trust in the same way, either.
The hardest part of this whole thing is not trusting my own heart not to fuck up everything. That I’m shutting down so much no one else will ever have a chance. Why am I fine with that? Yes. Why am I? That’s a question we’ll both need to ponder.
That’s because I won’t even take a chance at finding another Dana, for everything good and bad that implied. God, I love her so much and she’s blind. If I’m willing to absolutely overfocus on my flaws because I think she’s telling the truth, I think she should assume that I am telling the truth as well. That maybe my assumptions aren’t as stupid as she thinks they are, because she’s got me pegged, shiiiat. I am absolutely the dickhead she thinks I am, and also the angel. However, I am not the angel who fell.I’ve been Lucifer Morningstar the whole time. That’s because I’m not evil, I’m chaotic. I have a full rage of emotions. We are all Lucifer Morningstar, children of God and superior angels complete with witty banter and xenophobia. So many people become Lucifer by thinking they’re God. Divine right of kings didn’t always work out.
Neil Gaiman’s version of evil is my favorite, because his evil is absolutely based on fallibility. Lucifer is a more compelling character than God in some ways, because God does not identify as such until Jesus is born. Lucifer fell from heaven, so he is under the same constraints as we found ourselves when Eve “didn’t read the apple terms and conditions.” I am not being literal, it is a metaphor (explaining it’s a metaphor because Evangelicals won’t assume I don’t mean it’s a fact. See title of blog.
I just want her to can it on thinking that I am always Lucifer’s basest self. I, like him, find “oh, my Dad” moments everywhere.
It makes me feel romantic about the state of the world, even when it’s going to hell in a handbasket………. to paraphrase a church bulletin, “Helen Hunt is now in charge of the Lost & Found, so if you can’t find heaven, go to Helen Hunt for it.”
By the way, Australia is beating the United States in terms of stats right now, and I think that’s an apt metaphor for the paragraph above (please think that’s funny).
I feel gratitude flowing through me like water that my mental health issues dam. If I am trying to relieve emotional pain and trying to find its source, the path often leaves out how thankful I am because I am not working on that core. Particularly with writing, it gets out of control because I am not taking time to choose my words carefully. My rage ignites and it’s not pretty when it goes off. I am constantly learning to manage it, because I didn’t know where it was coming from for a number of years. It is hard work developing self-soothing mechanisms trying to recover from PTSD. I have said unforgivable things to the most important people in my life. It’s not their job to stay when it gets bad, so I am not trying to avoid culpability. I am having compassion for myself in the wake of my own consequences. I am entitled that without infringing on anyone else’s belief system.
It’s hard going back to the life I had before I had a goddess that talked back, very much a real description because since our relationship was virtual, the voice I made for her in my head echoed in my chest. “I’m averting my eyes!” “Well, stop it.” I’ve worked for years trying to shut down “The Committee,” the tapes in my head that provide my inner monologue. It hits different when you’re trying to shut down your external monologue that is also, in fact, your internal monologue.
The best part of a virtual relationship is that it’s all still here. We don’t have to create new memories. I’ve saved them all up. When I need her, I’ve got her just as much as I ever did. That’s enough, and she makes me smile and feel strong. So whether she ever thinks working it out is a good idea or not, I think she’s fantastic. No author has ever met such a beautiful character. I hope I can do her justice, because nothing will mean more to me over time than having a real picture of her in my mind that is not all good or bad but true. That it’s possible to drive me up the wall without dulling my curiosity or want to be near you.
I’ve always thought of myself as a Merlin-type character. I’m not so much into fantasy, but my favorite character when I was a kid was Merlin from “Sword in the Stone,” because even as a child I was a grumpy old man.
If I have the heart of a grumpy old wizard, she has the heart of a knight. Brave, crazy, stupid, wild, glorious, swings at every pitch and hopes for the best while I am the world’s biggest baseball fan when she’s at bat.
I’m fairly certain that if you could call it a sport, she could letter in it.
I’m absolutely certain that if you could call it a sport, I couldn’t.
I think one of he biggest things that was helpful in our relationship is that she had to wear suits and crap for work. I didn’t. Our perspectives are completely different. She’s been a boss for a long time. It’s fun busting her balls because I can tell she’s wrapped a little too tight. I am constantly rubbing up against her ire with kitchen humor, because as she got used to me being an asshole, she could flip shit back at me like the best chef I ever had. Nobody has ever made me laugh harder or be prouder with two letters, and you have to be an OG to know that one.
Guess you had to be there.
Nothing made me more grateful than laughing together, and nothing destroyed me more than realizing she’d always see my attempts at humor as negative, because I’d hurt her. I have never avoided accountability. She has avoided talking about how we could make things better so that I don’t constantly annoy her. I feel stupid that I thought I mattered more than I did- that I could have just walked away at any time without discussing anything and she wouldn’t have noticed.
It didn’t start out that way. How it started is not how it’s going, and that meme is solid. Because I hurt her, I was not a grumpy old wizard anymore, and I would have walked away happily if I’d known then what I know now. I thought she was reaching out to get closer, and now I don’t know what she meant by writing to me at all. My guess is that she has never believed any of this is real. That people develop real feelings even when the relationship is virtual. That surely my love for her can’t be as real and solid as it is. What I love about that is she doesn’t know how stable we are, but I do. I don’t have to dwell in negativity. I can just be grateful we met at all, because in some ways she was a character I needed to meet. In others, my writing has created a character for her. I hope that character loves as deeply as my beautiful girl, because I know what her real life sunshine is like. She turned the sun away from me, but I set it in motion. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, because it betrayed who I really am.
I’m a sweet, quiet geek who fell in love with the smallest place inside her, the one that had been missing. She was a catalyst for that change, so I fell in love with her, too. That’s because the love didn’t center around who she was entirely, but the two of us because I liked who she helped me to be. I’m stronger than I was. I’d have to be to walk away. I just got tired of trying to be less, so I asked her to be more.
One off the reasons that my beautiful girl destroyed me is that we affected each other with our secrets to an absolutely enormous degree, so over time she’d forgotten how deep our rabbit hole went. We went deep enough that in order for me to move on, we needed to start managing practical consequences and she told me she wasn’t interested. What didn’t mean anything to her might have ruined me for anyone else in terms of priority, and she didn’t think of that, I guarantee it. I’d met “The One” in a very roundabout way, because it wasn’t an affair I had to manage. It was off the wall feelings on both sides. She had to protect what I knew and vice versa. It was mutually assured destruction because she asked me to forget an impossible amount of shit.
I thought it was better to love each other through it, she thought it was better to tell me that I thought she was a bad person. That was never an issue, ever. At issue was “if you’re going to tell me something like this, love me the way I love you. I won’t accept less.” It wasn’t that I was goading and provoking. I had a genuine issue in talking about an issue because she had a genuine talent in avoidance.
I shouldn’t have settled, and I didn’t. But we’re still managing each other’s secrets and lies without our refuge in the cloud. It would never be worth that kind of devotion without that kind of love. I do have to forget, and not because I wanted to. Because she thought I couldn’t handle it. I could, as long as she could take it as easily as she could dish.
That’s what ruined our relationship. If I said something negative, she’d rip me a new one. If I said something positive, I’d never hear from her. My emotions frightened her, always, and they should have. She helped make them that intense without recognizing me, ever, so whether she appreciated my willingness to be hers or not, it was a stone cold fact.
If I say I would have done anything for her, I mean it. I got brownie points for an e-mail about busting my ass at her house after a storm, because we live close enough that it wouldn’t be a weird offer at all. It would have been a weird offer from Houston or Portland, but the move was a coincidence because I didn’t want to just pick up and start over in a new city, and I lived here 20 years ago from the time I made the decision to move back. If Minneapolis had been my hometown, I would have moved there. The first is that because our relationship was virtual, we could be anywhere. The second is that planes exist. I would have eaten it up if she’d come to Portland or Houston. I would have shown her on a platonic date in either city, and I only say that because that’s what it would look like now. In the beginning, we could have been a threesome if Dana hadn’t decided to be jealous. Polyamory is a thing, not that I’m necessarily that in practice, but if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in new relationship energy, I think she would have easily forgiven me and I would have gotten over it and the negative aspects of our relationship would have smoothed over in time.
New relationship energy ate my lunch because it was so different for me and so normal for her. Getting into a relationship with her hits different and because she’s already her, she’s not so aware of it.
I found a poem which expresses my feelings toward my beautiful girl, the platonic soul mate sent to shake me out of complacency… yet so far not designed to be a lifetime appointment. I am not letting that change me, however. Love does not depend on the recipient.
I told Kristina that she had saved me trying to translate my soul. Everything she writes guts me, but this takes me back. It is my entire personality, and the heart of miscommunication in a hundred percent of my relationships with neurotypical people. I have been this person in every relationship I’ve ever had.
I’ve been close to Bryn’s mom and dad since I was 19, as well. Here’s the most important thing her dad has ever taught me, because it has influenced a lot of what I write and preach. The hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know.
It’s a very difficult thing to be enlightened and also remember the dark. If you can record that transition, you might be able to explain it. You can help others by acknowledging their fear, and being their Moses.
The phrase “being Moses” means something to me, because Tony Mendez has taught me a thing or two about being a writer/teacher. In “Argo,” he tells State that the only way out of Tehran is through the airport…. That State should “send in a Moses” to bring them home. Because the meeting was speculative- so State could say they ran their ideas past CIA’s best ex-fil guy- I am not sure that Tony Mendez meant to say “it’s me. I’m Moses.”
The next scene in my mind is Tony preparing The Six for their trip to the grand bazaar in the middle of the city. Moses is sweating bullets for two reasons. The first is that if he is caught, The Agency cannot claim him. He’s working without a net. The second is that it’s not just his ass on the line. He and The Six get caught, as Jack points out, they die badly. The entire world will be watching.
That is an extreme example of having to teach someone, but it illustrates frustration on both sides of the equation. If Tony doesn’t prepare The Six, one if not all of them will be pulled in by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for questioning. Alternatively, The Six are just basic policy wonk diplomats with no training in deception and Tony has to teach them to walk their covers in a day.
It’s not the same as remembering what it was like not to know multiplication and division, but it’s the same concept. The difference is an age-appropriate level of fear. It clutches your chest whenever you leave your comfort zone, which is not the same when you’re five and when you’re fifty. It’s a proportional response.
Remembering what it was like not to know is often a failing of mine, because things that are so patently obvious to me are hiding in plain sight for others. I am going to be able to feel you before you even say anything. I can tell what kind of mood you’re in simply by watching body language. I can feel the frustration, anger, etc. steaming off you and the moment when that energy changes. I don’t have to learn someone’s mannerisms, habits, mood, and behavior to do this. It happens automatically. I will not be able to tell that there is a problem, but I know what it looks like to move in the world showing different emotions. The more people claim there isn’t one, the more I know whether they’re telling the truth or not, because there is an energy behind truth and white lies. I can feel that shift, and can feel you bullshitting me. Your next words don’t even matter, because the way you stiffened up before you answered betrayed you.
I feel like I can tell the most about people’s personalities and group dynamics without saying a word. I stand there and soak up everything in the room. I’m not just feeling how we are interacting, but how everyone is. I can tell not just how your behavior affected me personality, but also how well you know how to read a room…………
I am not bragging on myself, because others have this gift. Bryn is better at it than I am. Having her is like having a bloodhound. She can sniff out when I’m upset, and sometimes I think she does it by reading how the phone rings. 😛
Speaking of Bryn, she told me that she feels like a celebrity when I write about her on my blog. I told her that she is not the first person to tell me this. My friend James nearly made me die of laughter when he said, “I really just go to your page and search ‘James.’ Yes, I am that fucking shallow.” She told me that my entries were the perfect length for a morning constitutional, and I told her that she was nowhere near the first person to tell me that.
I missed my calling. My blog should be called “The Shit Show.”
One of the things that makes me frustrated about this time in my life is how crazy this must all seem to the outside world because I can’t be any more specific that I can right now. It doesn’t make any sense why an Internet relationship would make me react this way, and I can’t give you any more than “if you knew, you wouldn’t think I was crazy at all.” Nothing in my life is as it appears, I can only show you what I can show you. I need to protect my beautiful girl as much as I’m protecting myself, and these entries are just for me. They are written so that I can tell what kind of progress I am making, but not telling her story. Please remember that you are missing at least 50%, and I am comfortable looking like a total wack job in front of the whole world. All I can do is rest in my belief that no one else’s opinion matters. You’re just looking at my reputation.
I am looking at my character.
If you cannot see the difference, then you’re probably not introspective. When you dive into yourself, you see the difference between what others think of you and how little it matters compared to whether you can look in the mirror every day. How others’ opinions don’t pay your bills. How no one else is going to save you, so you have to find ways to save yourself. It’s a tangled web I’m weaving. It looks from the outside like I’m a fly, but I built this web by hand in a rainstorm.
The fact that there’s a chunk missing doesn’t make me feel good, but it’s not my work to sit with that. It’s my work to look at what happened and why. I feel like it’s an important story…. Critically so as we slouch toward a digital society where everyone lives and loves like this to some degree. Also, it’s an important story, but not unusual. It is to people who haven’t lived on the net since ‘99, maybe…. If you look up “geek” in the dictionary, it’s just a picture of me and Wil Wheaton.….. where was I going with this?
It’s not an unusual story, or at least, it doesn’t begin in an unusual way. Our deal was to be confidantes. I love women, so that kind of shit made me catch feelings (an inconvenient truth). She loves women, too, but not in the same way. She caught feelings, too. They just didn’t match, and yet that doesn’t mean her feelings are lesser than. There is no such thing as “the friend zone.” Either you love someone and want them in your life, or you don’t. If you think otherwise, grow up.
I have always felt this way. It’s just that as my life starting spinning out of control, she was the unlucky recipient of shit rolling downhill, and it wasn’t pleasant for either one of us. She kicked my ass, daily, in a way that truly hurt for all the right reasons. I was in the hospital for a few days because I couldn’t get in to see a regular psychiatrist quick enough to deal with acute suicidal ideation, and it was my beautiful girl’s idea. Just move under your own power. I did, and I’ve never regretted it.
I haven’t regretted it to the point that think her strident, no bullshit personality could have saved other people struggling with depression as well, because depression uses the very best lies against you to make you powerless against your own thoughts. No one loves you. You’re too much. You’re so much no one will ever love you. No one will ever be able to put up with you.
I find it interesting that her words made me go to that place sometimes and lifted me out of it in others. It all depended on what my disease wanted out of me that day, and it was relentless. Neurotypical people want to save you, and there is no way to do that. It’s not that they’re incapable. It’s that they don’t know how to fight brain gremlins, and if we already feel like you think we’re too much, we’re not going to help you or even let you know what they are.
I got to that place with my beautiful girl. When she cut off her emotions from me, it didn’t feel safe to open up to her anymore. We weren’t dealing with our mutual brain gremlins anymore, which made me feel like a freak show most of the time. She’s neurotypical, which means that even our brain gremlins are different. But that doesn’t mean hers are less valid. It didn’t feel safe to have a sounding board that was just me talking to myself, because for as much as I got out of workshopping my issues, what makes me feel safe in a relationship is mutually diving into things. Feeling supported as well as supporting others. She supported me and wouldn’t let me support her, so I always felt like “the younger one.” I have bipolar and ADHD, which leads a lot of people to attribute my behavior to immaturity, when in reality, it’s just different. You don’t get the same behavior out of people who literally have no idea how to function in society.
It’s exhausting to feel like you’ve given 350% to something and it still looking like you’re in kindergarten because everything went wrong at once because of some fucking brain chemical or another. At night, I’m not relaxing. I’m paralyzed with indecision and it reads as lazy.
Here’s why it’s so much effort to be alive. I have to remember to do everything. Nothing becomes habit, nothing gets easier. The morning routine is hard every day. It does not “get easier once you get used to it.” Ever. You spend the same amount of energy on every task, every day.
Because I’m not just ADHD, my bipolar and anxiety remind me all the time of just how unacceptable that is, and it’s not something I can change. I just have to manage it. If I designed a house, it would have all my shit where I could see it, because my mind doesn’t store where things go. My mind doesn’t store the memory of where I put things, even if it was just a few minutes ago. I have very little peripheral vision, so I can drop something next to me and spend 20 minutes looking for it, because where I thought the thing dropped is several feet from where I thought it would be.
If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.
Speaking of my mother, it’s a shame that I didn’t get to have the relationship I wanted with her until the very end. I think all the time what it would be like to have my mom as my beautiful girl…. The one I look to for love because I can…. The one who’d die to protect me and I’d feel the same. I would never have traded one relationship for the other. It’s just a type of female friendship that my mother and I would have enjoyed.
I’m not sure that I mentioned what it was like seeing my aunt Nancy at my grandfather’s funeral. It was my father’s father, and I knew in less than a second that she hadn’t come for her. Of course Lone Star, Texas is a tiny town and they knew each other, but she was bringing my mother’s spirit even though it was the other side of my family.
I choked up and tried not to cry the minute she started talking. She could have read the phone book and I’d be sobbing. That’s because there’s about the same age difference between my mom and Nancy as there is between Lindsay and me, so their voices are for all practical intents and purposes, the same. That voice is still in my head days later, and I’m glad that she comes to DC all the time. My cousin Nathan is a doctor in Alexandria, VA, about 40 minutes from me.
My aunt still has a house in Lone Star, very near my grandfather’s on Starlight Lake. Our family has agreed to all chip in and keep the Lanagan house so we’ll be neighbors even if I’d originally come to spend time with my dad’s side of the family.
Here’s the thing about Lone Star, Texas.
It doesn’t seem ideal until you realize that with a fast internet connection and being able to buy land for a dollar, it’s not so bad. I’d never want to be that isolated full time, but I get it. If I could get an affordable lake house somewhere, that’d be the end of it for me, too…. It just wouldn’t be in Texas, and I’m not sure there are any lakes in this area where the houses aren’t a million dollars…. Wait. Scratch that. They were a million dollars in 2001. Now they’re seven.
The great thing about buying land is that if you didn’t have a lake before you bought it, you can just put one in. 😛
(Oh, that would be so fun. I’d love swimming in water with actual fish.)
So, you can do all that in bum fuck, Texas, and nothing on God’s green earth would tell me buying property there would work out well. I would hate the politics. I’d hate the struggle. I left all that behind because Lindsay is strong enough to work with those people and try to get them to change their minds. I am a nervous wreck when it comes to that kind of stuff. In this case, I think it helps her that she’s straight because she has more clinical separation than I do.
Maybe in ten years I’ll be grouchy enough to rejoin the cadre of Texans screaming to get their state back. Dallas, Houston, and Austin are tired. Get your shit together, Texas. I realize that in some ways, Austin is the problem….. but they have the same issue as DC. The government is conservative as shit, and the locals are actually smart.
Speaking of Texas, I reconnected with a high school friend from HSPVA that lives in The District, so he’s even closer to me than when he lived in Virginia. He posted on Facebook that he needed a house sitter because his regular one was unavailable, and even though we hadn’t talked in legit years, I thought, “this is an Honors Band friend. You gotta do it.” He felt the same way, so we spent some time together on Saturday. I met his partner, dogs, and corn snake. I think it will lead to more down the road, as we both have mutual friends here, as well as having gone to PVA, so our friends come through all the time.
I learned something I didn’t know, and that’s always fun. My 10th grade science teacher gave Beyoncé a C. 😛
I wasn’t there at the time. It must have been either the year I left or the year after, because I don’t remember whether B was two years behind me or three (yes, I am older than Beyoncé. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice).
Since I’ll be in The District all week, I’m looking forward to having a home base in the middle of everything. The house is indescribably close to the Metro, easier to walk from one to the other than drive because you can cut through parking lots. It’s also a classic DC row house, just the perfect house I’d have picked for myself had I wanted to live in the middle of the city all the time.
I do not regret choosing to live in the suburbs, because for what I pay, what I get is RIDICULOUS. I chose to have the smallest room in a GIANT house. I love having a real kitchen and not a shitty apartment galley. The only thing I would change is the stove- it’s electric and not gas. When we had to replace the stove, I asked if we could switch, but our kitchen isn’t wired up like that. No big deal. I have friends who will let me cook at their houses….. even if they have All-Clad, DANA. 😛
That is an old, old joke. Dana’s All-Clad set is heirloom. Her great grandkids wouldn’t have to buy new cookware, and I was there when they were new. It took Dana a little bit to trust me with them, and it became a running joke. Here’s a story she doesn’t know. I invited a woman over to hang out while she wasn’t home, another cook so I thought she was sane. I told her that Dana would freak the fuck out if she used steel wool on the pans, so please don’t. I come in the kitchen and there she is, scrubbing the fuck out of our pans with exactly the thing I told her not to use. I didn’t care if she wanted to “get away with it.” I bitched her out and we’re not friends anymore, mostly because she thought I was crazy for telling her what to do.
It was a “keep my wife’s name out your mouth” moment.
I’ve had classic little kid surgeries, but I don’t know if they count because none of them were what you’d think of when the phrase “major surgery” comes around. I had tubes put in my ears. I had the muscles shortened on one eye so it didn’t drift as bad. Nothing where I had to stay in the hospital, except for an allergic reaction. That was at least 30 years ago, and I never did figure out the trigger. Perhaps it was the stress of coming out. I was in fifth grade. It is not impossible, because it was so mystifying that Dr. Leaves thought it could be the pink dye in Benadryl.
With the benefit of time, I doubt it.
Right now I am doing emotional surgery on myself, which I have been doing all along as a blogger. I just feel like I’ve graduated from stitching myself up to removing diseased tissue. I am getting out all the good and bad things in my life, throwing them up here like a set of X-rays so that I can look at them dispassionately. It’s the only way I can direct myself, because I cannot feel this level of emotional pain and physically move without it.
I have come to a very good place. This morning, I am just empty. I have spent all my energy pouring everything out, and the tap is dusty. I have to wait for a rainstorm to access inspiration, and that is okay. When the inspiration to write is the ending of a major relationship (in terms of time, not romance), I write until I shut down.
Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?
I have no idea what this means outside of Oregon. In Oregon, there’s infrastructure for sustainability. In Maryland, it is “good luck, God bless.” I want to talk about things I do to sustain my own life.
Being a writer has changed my perspective on everyone and everything who isn’t me. I will make them me by inhaling, life as ink on the exhale.
“Life as ink on the exhale” is the perfect phrase for all of this.
“Writing is ink on the exhale” is a better sentence than I’ve written in a while. I should quit for today. 😉 I realize this is extrapolating data from an incomplete set, though, because I can never explain in a catchphrase how experiences go in and ink comes out. I can’t tell you who and what and why is most important that day. The only reason my beautiful girl pops up so often is that as I’ve said before, she’s my muse. She’s the ink. What is sad about that is the absolute confusion as to why it’s the last bottle. How do you cope with not knowing whether someone even wants to meet you or not, yet tells you nothing’s wrong and you’re the only one who ever trashes anything. I have lived long enough to know that I am only trashing the relationship she wants with me. I can have the relationship I want with her on my own, and in a lot of ways, it feels the same. To me, that is also trashing a relationship……. letting starvation rule over your compassion.
I did not want to be in a relationship that was starving, particularly one that had flourished. The problem came in when I’d wronged her and wanted to be forgiven, because she never got over how it felt to be hurt by me. She could forgive me, but she couldn’t open up again…… at least, not for years. Then, she started to loosen up and I hadn’t been so profoundly happy in years. I invited her to come with me wherever I went in the world, dreaming pie in the sky- and told her to bring her husband, kids, dogs, books, wtfever. I felt safe enough to say something like that because she was opening up emotionally.
I don’t know what would have happened with that train of thought, because she never told me what she thought and I got tired of living in grey area. I would have given her an organ. I never got a fraction of that level of emotion from her, and I’m supposed to believe I’m the one that trashes everything?
What I have to remember is that we don’t know each other. We have created characters for each other that live in our heads, which may or may not be 100% accurate. Absolutely none of that stopped me from giving her access to everything. Just everything. She’s the only one to whom I’ve ever given editorial control of this blog, and the only one that knows the code that unlocks my phone. I have never done this for anyone else, ever, and I will never do it again.
I didn’t give her either of those things to impress her. I did it to make her feel comfortable. I did it so she would know I was listening.
As I listened, ink on the exhale traveled the spectrum, inventing colors as it soaked into the page. I am now strong enough to look at her e-mails now, and I saw something that jumped out at me. She said something about how I thought she’d wronged me, and she’d read it wrong. I said that I had wronged her. Another time, she got mad at me for “the lies you (plural) tell, and that’s not like you (personal) at all.” She thought I was calling her an actual liar, and I wasn’t. I thought she had told white lies about a few things to protect my feelings, and “the lies you tell” is a classic South Texas way to say it, but you’re not talking about a specific person. You are talking about a nebulous “you.” She lit into me, and I told her I was sorry I had attacked her with grammar. In my head, I was screaming. Why would a writer decide to emotionally roast me over the coals like this? What the fuck was wrong with her freshman comp? I thought I had made my point overly clear by being sure to note grammar on both kinds of “you.” I was wrong.
I never understood why she thought she wasn’t good enough for me. Not ever. I hated the way she treated herself in front of me, as if I was a dictator and she was hell bent on pleasing me and angry that she just couldn’t do it. I am certain that my actions facilitated this, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t want a different outcome. I tried to tell her that she was beautiful, perfect over and over, an ostinato to drown out her disbelief.
If she thought she disappointed me by not also being sexually fluid, it would have been helpful for her to say that. If she thought she disappointed me because my standards were so high, it would have helped to ask me what they were. I have never known feelings this intense, but in the way I’d feel if my sister was my first priority, not my wife. She has never disappointed me a day in our lives, and she never did until she felt like she was being picked on and didn’t have enough stamina to hear me out. She thinks I don’t have enough stamina to hear her out. I do. It’s just that what’s coming out of her mouth is total bullshit, and not because she’s a liar. It’s that she hasn’t dived into the wreck. She’s going to own herself the way I have here, and it’s going to be magnificent. You know you love someone when you can see them coming into themselves before they do, and fighting you so hardcore that you know you won’t be there at the finish line. For me, that moment became clear when I realized that I should be more concerned that she has lost me. I am not nothing.
I cannot know her feelings on the matter, yet I also cannot treat myself as if I’m so disposable no one will notice.
I’ve had enough of that, and it’s not sustainable.
Part of me has never been in love before, and never will be without truly divine intervention. This is because for as much as I’m afraid of someone hurting me, I am also afraid of hurting them. I know I can make and keep healthy friendships. I have resolved enough in myself at least to do that, and I never have to worry about finding another friend in my life, because I only need one. The position has been filled.
I worry about everything, and overexplaining is a trauma response. When I absolutely shut down this thing we’ve managed over the years, I told her I’d realized that every fight was like this one. I’d say too much, she’d say too little, and on and on and on. Birthday present, Christmas present, fuck off, judgmental dickhead. There’s a problem and I won’t tell you, I just won’t speak to you for weeks or months.
The pattern was sick and twisted and I made it happen. Therefore, I needed to make it unhappen. She told me she didn’t know a damn thing about love in the very beginning, and when I decided to teach her, it was perfect. We were tracking together like white on rice. I just didn’t teach her to love me in the way I could hear it, but not for lack of trying. If anything, I was Mozart’s “too many notes.” I commissioned an SATB arrangement for every issue we had, and it was ridiculous. That was the quickest way to divorce for me, and she helped my marriage fail in her idiocy, not malice. She broke me, and she doesn’t know it. But that part of it wasn’t about me.
Learning to recognize where I was in my polyamorous haze of a head, where I was loved romantically and platonically- yet in my brain, there was no difference in priority. For instance, if your wife and your mother are hurt at the same time, you prioritize based on how serious the injury might be on your mother’s part, because your wife comes first. Always. You made that vow when you married her. At the same time, Dana couldn’t fault me for loving my beautiful girl intensely, either. She loved her family just as much and would have said exactly the same thing. Actually, she never did anything to prove to me that I was more important than her family. Nevermind. Bad analogy.
So, when Dana and I broke up, I had absolutely no need for a replacement. I’d been hit, and it took years until I fell in love again, and it is no fucking coincidence that he was the biggest motherfucker I could find trained to hit the nuts off a gnat with several different kinds of weapons. If you think dating men didn’t have anything to do with that fight, fuck off. I’ll be looking for that kind of protection forever. Why do you think Zac is so important? He’s not just interested in intelligence so we get along on that level. He will fuck you up if he thinks you’re going to mess with any of his friends. He just doesn’t because he wouldn’t start a fight, but he’d end it.
Trying to decide if that’s enough pain for today, because I am in it now. Just looking at everything painful and deciding how to let go of it. I feel like everyone is seeing me through the heuristic that I’ve been in love with a straight woman for ten years and that’s the only reason I haven’t gotten married again. That’s a double fuck you because most women who have been HIT BY MEN wait a long time to get married again, too. So what’s the real issue here?
I am terrified of women, and my beautiful girl is goddamn lucky I didn’t run from her as well. She’s as physically intimidating as Dana, just in a different way. Even more muscular, which should have turned me on and instead felt like a risk.
Because there was no chance in hell that we would actually be domestic partners, I could interact with a woman from hundreds of miles away. That’s fucking close enough. I think it is absolutely perfect that we’ve never met and yet I feel like a Doctor Who companion because we’ve “traveled together” long enough that she knows my original hair color……… and I know hers. That she doesn’t dye it, it has changed colors over time because women age like fine wine. Men just tell them they don’t.
I would do unspeakable things to Helen Mirren with the proper permission, preferably in writing and notarized. She is the perfect example of getting better with age, because she’s another person who doesn’t give a fuck what you think. She started out as a carny. You can’t scare her for love or money.
Where am I? What’s my name again?
I have to interrupt my pain signals and thinking of beautiful women is the easiest way to accomplish that goal. Therefore, when I’m writing, it often surfs up and down in my subconscious as I touch pain and back off….. again, overexplaining as a trauma response. I realized I could just roll with it because I am not focusing on the people who read every day, but making it feel lie you had to be there or you missed it. You have to read every post rather than dropping in once. I just have to be interesting enough not to lose the ones who are bored, and right now they can take a right. I’m going through a thing here, man. Back the fuck up.
I swear to Christ, falling in love with my beautiful girl is probably the first time I’ve ever really been in love before, and absolutely no disrespect to anyone I’ve ever dated. You didn’t do anything wrong, and I loved our time together. It’s that my perspective changed. I wasn’t in a narcissistic train wreck of a relationship that started years before I had a girlfriend, and I’d only been dating Ryan for a few months. It was the first time I really saw myself, and I fell in love with me…. the me in love with her.
When I realized that I couldn’t have that romantically, but she’d show up for me anyway, I was on board. I don’t care if my only job is to bring her a Diet Coke when she wants it. Seriously. Just hit the button, baby girl. I treat her like I treat my sister…. seeing her as both older and younger as well. She’s older in some ways, I am in others. Lindsay is a lobbyist, I’m a writer. She’s in front of people all day, I’d rather have dental surgery. The differences are striking, and they’re not the same as with Stifler’s mom over there (she has a son and I’m not stupid- though if she reads this I will have a black eye by morning………. “why would you say something so controversial, yet so bold?”). But just because they’re not the same doesn’t mean she and Lindsay aren’t the same archetype. Lindsay would definitely be Stifler’s mom if she had a kid. There’s no doubt in my mind.. I also know that she would be pleased to know she’s still that hot at 40 (we’re almost six years apart- my 46th is Sept. 10th).
It feels good to get back to the kind of humor we used to share instead of there being topics that are off limits. I could never have told that joke in front of her now, but when she sent me a recent picture, I did say “wtf? You wake up like this?” Like, fuck me. Just let me be the swamp witch in our relationship because all the other women are. Bet.
The fact that she thinks it means something now is ridiculous, so let her. If my other friends think I’m serious, I’ll remind them how I have spent months detailing why this relationship is deceased, pining for the fjords, met the choir invisible, fucking snuffed it. I feel like ten years is enough stories to keep me going. I don’t need more if they’re all going to be like our last few interactions. I don’t care if she thinks I’m the devil, because having a friend who is a writer and blogs all the time and you support them in every way possible until you don’t like what you see in the mirror? I get why she can’t be identified. I don’t get why she cares what people think. I just have to respect it.
I can quote chapter and verse why I shouldn’t write about her, and yet none of the things I said before I broke her trust mattered. She automatically assumed that once our relationship was over, I’d google tattoo her. No. I gave a google tattoo to a woman who abused me as a child. If we’d gotten into it as adults, equals, she would have deserved the same protection. It was the hard line of keeping her secrets and protecting other little girls. I chose the WRONG ANSWER for 23 years. So, anyone who thinks I gave that tattoo lightly can take a long walk on a short pier, but I hope you choke on your words first.
This relationship is different. For the first time, I knew what it felt like to love someone with wild abandon, not worried that our relationship was toxic. I am worried that we set up toxic patterns through the nature of the Internet, but never that we are toxic people. We have issues to work on, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. Or, it didn’t until she said she had a problem, I handled it, I asked her to talk about her feelings, she dumped me. I went apeshit because her first reaction is to run always. I thought we were finished with that shit. I’ve told her abandonment is my trigger a hundred times, and not one goddamn one mattered. She did it twice in like a two month period. I wasn’t the only one who could accuse the other of being done and not done, bombing everything. Every accusation was a confession.
I wasn’t out because I couldn’t forgive her. I was out because I don’t respect her, and won’t until she uses some of that big dick energy to say she’s ready to work on the problem, because that’s what it’s going to take. Turning her words back around on her, “looking inside yourself isn’t for sissies.” If she grows emotionally, she’s welcome. But I won’t stand for someone treating me like they wish the relationship never happened. She stomped all over my worthlessness loop every day for years, and I fucking aged. That’s because she made sure to tell me what a mistake she’d made in befriending me in the first place. I just kept thinking “well, that escalated quickly.” She always thought of herself as the protagonist. Never looking at her behavior from the outside in her writing made it look like she had never hurt me at all. I’d stood there and slapped my own face.
Surely she’s not that stupid. Surely she has a concept of her role in things from my view. Surely she’s taken in how I feel about things. Surely she’d spent time in her mind running over my questions.
I only ran away from her when I couldn’t read her handwriting.
What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?
I am a cook. I don’t have a way to rank anything because in my world, when I say “apples to oranges,” I mean actual fruit. What I will say is that I have a very advanced palate, so it takes a lot to impress me. It doesn’t need to be fancy. I can tell a good cook from a bad one in one egg.
I was taught by the best, so I’m the best through transitive properties. But I’m the best at home. “No Fish on Mondays” is written from the first person perspective because I was living in a memory, not recalling it. However, I decided that the kitchen was too much for me physically- that I could have cerebral palsy or get my stripes in the kitchen, but I couldn’t do both and I figured that not being a chef was easier than curing CP.
That reminds me of a beautiful memory with my Supergrover, which I only bring up because I need it so bad. I figured out some more stuff that went into our demise that I could have told her, but I didn’t because I was trying to spare her feelings. As a result, I’m working through all of it on my own so that I don’t turn into a bitter queen. I don’t read “angry dyke.” I read “bitchy queen” all day. Anyway, the story is that another line cook sexually harassed me and she offered to kill him. I know enough to know it would have been with her bare hands. Honey badger don’t care. God, I feel the same way. I go apeshit inside when anyone crosses her. Believe me when I say she is a monster in the best sense of the word. It’s a good feeling when you’re the one holding the leash, and the ones closest to her often do. She’s not mean to us. She’s mean for us.
If you don’t have that friend, you don’t have a friend. Choose wisely.
And now back to our regularly scheduled program. It just feels better to write about all the things I love about her rather than sending negativity out into the world. I don’t even know if she’s reading and I don’t care. It’s not about her. It’s about healing me.
So, no way to rank but lots of standouts. I love everything, from cheap to expensive.
My favorite cheap thing is grocery store pizza, particularly the fancy kind with rising crust that actually smells like yeast. If you get your pizza delivered, you can’t enjoy the smell of it baking and it takes the same amount of time now that Domino’s drivers aren’t constantly tasked with delivery or death.
My favorite middle tier thing is pesto sauce. This is because you can buy pasta for a dollar a box and $15 pesto and all of the sudden you have a dish you could sell at a restaurant for more than that.
My favorite expensive thing is sushi, because even at the grocery store, sushi grade ahi is pricey. So is good wasabi. However, being able to “roll my own” has meant a lot to me in terms of education. I can make pretty good sushi-su (sp?), the rice with Kewpie and rice vinegar. I never roll it tight enough, but I don’t care. I could eat ahi and rice out of literally anything. I should learn the difference between Japanese and Hawaiian cooking because I could probably do a poke bowl with one hand tied behind my back…. but again, sushi grade ahi is just ridiculous in price most of the time, and even more expensive at a restaurant, where I’m always tempted to upgrade to yellowtail, soft shell crab, or salmon (seriously, there is no logic to the Philadelphia roll. WHY IS IT ADDICTIVE.)
The funniest conversation I’ve had in a sushi restaurant is that I told Dana that I wanted a Mexican roll (I don’t remember what was in it, probably fried jalapenos). She asked me if I could eat a whole Mexican, didn’t realize what she’d said, and then we both ended up nearly on the floor…… just shaking with laughter. The whites are so pretty next to the coloreds (that was the lights on the Christmas tree). Lord Jesus, help me I’m falling down the stairs I’m laughing so hard…. as if I was listening to the Eddie Murphy routine from whence the line appears.
When I talk about food, I talk about my ex-wife. It’s inevitable, because most of my adventure with food started at “Hi, I’m Dana.” We worked together for three years (I think?) and two restaurants. In the first, we basically ran our own kitchen because we were the only ones on shift. The second was at the Portland airport, and those restaurants don’t come to play. It wasn’t irritating locking up the knives at night, but it was hell trying to find parking at the airport and it took a long time to get from the parking into the building.
The coolest part of my cooking career was having the badge that let you walk directly up to the planes if you wanted. I could literally stand out on the tarmac and no one gave a shit. You cannot imagine how many times I imagined stowing away, but the issue with being on the tarmac is that you have NO idea where the planes are going. To some, that might be exciting. X means airports with international flights, so at PDX I could have ended up in Houston or Helsinki. Those are two very inconvenient cities to arrive with no luggage…. not that any city is, but not to know whether you need ski pants or sundresses isn’t that great.
Speaking of ski pants, I watch this YouTuber named Dave Cad that has ads for the most amazing Finnish clothing company. It’s kind of like REI and Uniqlo, and I’ll look it up if you’re interested in the comments. Anyway, Dave lives in Helsinki, but he was road tripping up to Kilpisjaarvi (sp?), which is so far up it was only three degrees Celsius in late June. It makes sense. Lapland is supposedly where Santa Claus lives, as well as the thrill of seeing Dave’s glass igloo. The glass igloo is so that you can ile in bed and watch the aurora borealis. OMG Bryn. That’s on our bucket list now, too. Note to self…. rent a car. Kilpisjaarvi is the most beautiful tiny little town I’ve ever seen. If I lived in Finland, that’s where I’d settle. I want hygge for the rest of my life (from Norwegian… the cosy feeling you get in the winter…. SO similar to Portland except not constantly raining. Snow is easier to me to deal with than rain, because it doesn’t hurt as much when it’s being pelted at you.
Plus, I’d like to start a garden. I’ve watched a couple videos on Finnish chefs because the palate is so much different than ours. I mean, just straight up BIZARRE. In every piece of footage, I am reminded of Anthony Bourdain in Iceland. It’s my favorite episode of No Reservations because he is the crankiest little bitch I’ve ever seen all the way through it. Comparable to Namibia, where he griped he hadn’t had anything without sand, fur, or shit in it for three days.
That part of the world has completely different plants. Vegan food would be off the chain when fruits and veg are in season. If I did have the strength to open a restaurant, Kilpisjaarvi would be excellent because it’s a tiny, tiny town and I could start out small. (I’m just gaming this out. I’m not crazy enough to do this by tomorrow). I think I’d close in the winter, at least part of the time, because I don’t think there would be enough business to survive on bread, cheese and meat until Spring. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s what they eat. Just don’t drink with a Finn. Ever. You just don’t have it in you, and I don’t even know you.
I would be an excellent Finn, for the same reason that I’d rather spend time alone as much as they would. I may not have Finnish blood, but my personality is limited to one country. 😛 No DNA test needed.
Actually, I think Lindsay said we do have some Finnish blood, but it’s only like 3%, which is obviously enough to practically knight me there. Obviously.
Stating the obvious to an obscene amount, what would it be like to live in a country where they don’t hate women and lesbians?
That means I’d go check it out even if the food was terrible.
Not in a mean way, like launching a bomb. In the way where you realize that you have absolutely said the thing you needed to say and it cleaned you out so hardcore that the tears actually stopped. When I am writing, I am the most vulnerable. I often cry when I’m writing, the ablutions coming from my own eyes. I touch type so it doesn’t matter if the screen gets blurry.
It occurred to me that I’ve been looking at this wrong. If my beautiful girl is telling me that she doesn’t have time, that’s why she thinks I’m goading and provoking her. She’s not taking the time to correct the story she’s telling herself, and hurting herself with my words. I know this because she could say the same thing verbatim, we’re just opposite. She’s only processing our interactions through the lens of what’s going on right now. I’m filtering her behavior through every interaction we’ve ever had. Our perspectives are different, because she is seeing me as the person I am in this minute, and not whether my behavior is out of character or not.
She thinks I bring up things a second time in order to goad and provoke her, when I’m repeating myself because it’s important and she hasn’t acknowledged. She has too much on her plate for me to expect that she’d go back to an e-mail, because there’s a thousand on top now. So, what comes across as context to me doesn’t translate.
Now do you see what I mean about wanting to clear up this crap in person? I cannot tell you how much fun we would have had if we’d only made the commitment to just be weird. Just have it out. It’s going to be awful at first. We’ll get over it. We’re fucking hysterical.
We would have owned this fucking city, and I know it. I would have done some very shady shit just to be able to show her my DC. Ashton Kutcher made me laugh the other day when he said that he just loved Jennifer Aniston, so he went up to her husband (Brad Pitt at the time) and asked him if he could take her on a date. That he would be very respectful and have her home by ten and all that shit. Brad laughed his ass off and told him to go ask her. This is the high comedy I was looking for. I would never in my lifetime do anything to make my beautiful girl uncomfortable, and that probably would have, but it made me go into the “I can’t even make any sound” laugh. I’m thinking about it again today, because he and I have a wonderful relationship in my head. Don’t think we haven’t gamed out what it’s like to be hers. Shit.
He’s the face of God when I need a higher authority.
I cannot speak for him, but I think he decided a very long time ago that he was going to marry her cerebral circus, knowing intimately that he was the Rhoda and she was the Mary and that would never, ever, ever change. This is because she’s the kind of personality that everyone who has ever loved her has felt this way within five minutes. After meeting many narcissists who’ve been like that, it was unimaginably beautiful standing up with someone who really was that genuine. That lovebombed because her love really was that big, it wasn’t a ploy or a game. Finally, someone who loved every bit as big as me. Someone who wanted to think big and didn’t think my ideas were crazy because she was in charge of lots crazier shit than my goat roping clusterfuck of a blog. I hope she felt the same way about me, but I am not sure I did enough to prove it. That’s because the story she was telling herself is that because she’s so busy, I am unhappy. This is not true. She is not emotionally available, and I am unhappy. You can spend five minutes a year with me if you’re willing to go deep and actually catch up. She told herself that she was failing me, when there aren’t even words for how much my love and loyalty branches over her, as if to provide shade.
She doesn’t recognize wanting to hear her emotions and deepen our connection as my love language, or doesn’t want to open up. This is what felt the most nebulous. If you don’t want to open up to me, that’s fine. But tell me you don’t want to open up to me so that I can leave in peace, because I have learned so much about what love is after so many years of learning what it isn’t. Those aren’t my words, but they’re true and I can’t remember who said them.
Everything she told me I was doing was passive-aggressive, because since I’d broken her trust, it was impossible for her to believe that my motives were pure. She got tired of me speaking to her the way I normally do because who even am I? Why should she even have to listen to this crap? Why can’t I just move on?
I did move on, but trauma triggers happen. Doesn’t mean I was trying to attack you when it did. I am emotionally intelligent enough to explain anything on earth. That’s when her thinking I was goading and provoking took an ugly turn, because it taught me that she really didn’t understand me at all because not correcting the story she was telling herself over the years made her think I was a dark character most of the time. Fair, but don’t keep me in your life if you think that. Go have your feelings by yourself. I let her think I was a dark character because I thought that she’d realize how much time had gone by and snap out of it.
She didn’t, and it gave me a complex because she’d do things like accuse me of trying to meet her friends just so I could get close to her. It was never even in the realm of possibility. Ever. She treated me like dirt and I let her, browbeating myself for opening up to her on a romantic level because she’d be able to use it effectively forever. She could justify emotionally starving our relationship for years on end, because I wasn’t a priority.
That wouldn’t have even registered as important to me if she didn’t also love me like a house on fire and show me that, too. It was an unusual kinship, which I thought of as a unique, quirky platonic love story we could have sold for millions and she called it “this thing we’ve managed over the years.” I should have ghosted her then, because Jesus fuck. That was harsh, even for her.
She never addressed the virtual/physical cognitive dissonance and didn’t even bother to respond when I called her out on it, a full eight years after I’d broken her trust. That’s when I knew we were absolutely fucked and to stop trying. If she couldn’t even talk about her feelings or meeting up to try and change our reactions to each other, this pattern needed to die because we were both exhausted at trying to read the other one. It’s just that because she wasn’t really seeing me, she was attributing behaviors to me that aren’t my personality at all.
I don’t think she realizes that every INFJ is thousands of years old. Every single one, from the time that they are born. If you’ve read “The Giver,” I can think of no better analogy. INFJs are the Givers and Receivers of the world, the memories. I should never have let this relationship get to where it is now, because I feel like I should have recognized what I’d done and why things would never go back. Every time our relationship started up again, it reminded me that I wasn’t enough. That I would never be enough. She didn’t see me as the same person, and a stain stands out on white fabric.
She would say none of that’s true. That’s she’s done plenty of things for me. And yet none of them were the things that would have actually said to me that we’d be all right. She felt like she couldn’t win with me, when I was constantly telling her what would work. My love language is words of affirmation. Hers is action. Because of the virtual/physical disconnect, I had to get creative, and I did.
She did the same creative and wonderful things for me, but we weren’t connecting the way that we had. We didn’t even use the same language. It felt like getting a cheap futon home and only having Spanish instructions, that we could have figured it out working together…….. but we didn’t.
I’m going to have to stop saying I’m going to stop writing about things, because I just realized that the ablutions are not the tears.
I put a moratorium on writing about my beautiful girl yesterday, and then I get a prompt like this. Whelp. Here we go. Hold on to your butts.
When I said before that there is a place in everyone that feels infantile and defenseless and I’d given mine to my friend, it was that in 20 minutes worth of talking together, I’d made her God in my mind. Do you remember the movie “Contact?” That when the aliens reach out, it’s to a little girl, so they project an image of her father to explain everything so she is not afraid. What I love about this scene is that it’s not frightening to her because she’s been told that it’s just an image to make her listen harder.
That’s who she was to me. The image of God that made me listen harder, not that I was putting her on a pedestal and thought she was more important than me. It’s true that if we hadn’t been so incredibly different, we wouldn’t have lasted so long. We’d have developed a Venn diagram on friends that would have made us lose the stranger on a train feeling that made me crave her. I can’t even explain that part of it, only that our conversations were so full of emotion that at the time, my favorite song was “Your Love is My Drug.” I was the most complicated 808 percussion rhythm in existence. It was exactly like doing a concerto at Carnegie Hall, where people only expect the highest level of musicianship, or perhaps a music jury to keep your chair in a major orchestra. In the orchestral example, I was a soprano hanging off a ledge with a cadenza to rival Kathleen Battle. The music jury is realizing you’re last chair and learning to roll with it. You’re just happy you got in.
Plus, I’m an INFJ. I am built for people to trauma dump all over me. It makes me want to fix all the things and I will put lots o energy into it because they’re helping me find myself a day at a time. What she never knew that I did was how many hours I gave her while she wasn’t in the room. Therefore, I think she thought I was always winging it, when I was running things past her to correct the story I was telling myself.
She didn’t, and it made her say things to the effect that I never missed a chance to tell her how much her problems were a burden for me. If I’d thought about it, I would have replied that I think of her with every term of endearment that has ever existed, particularly “mulkvisti,” which comes from Suomi and means “one I hate less than the others.” What she couldn’t see is that I was pouring my heart out to her and telling her how much her words affected me. She thought I was rejecting her, when I was telling her that my empathy was so large I was hurting for her, and please recognize that I made sacrifices, too. If she only knew how much love I send through the chord that runs between us (in the geometric sense of the word, not a typo)………. sometimes I put Red Bull in it just in case she’s running a quart low. Those metaphysical images give me life, and I’m rebelling against the way I have seen her treat everyone else and how I am not in that group anymore.
She can tell other women that they’re beautiful, that she loves them, sign off with kisses and hugs. To me, that is what is keeping my mistakes over my head and making it drip on my face every day. That would mean we were getting back to normal, because it made me feel that she couldn’t tell me those things because she thought I’d overreact and think she’d been touched by an angel or some shit. She doesn’t know how much it means to me when she sends me heart emojis, even. To me, showing up is often hearing that I am beautiful and loved despite all my flaws and failures, too. Showing up big would be acknowledging all my love and care as much as she’s recognized my ire.
She doesn’t recognize that at times my love for her is fucking feral, and I know she feels the same way about me because she went apeshit when Sam dumped me. She doesn’t know that I allowed myself the absolute luxury of falling in love with Daniel and my queer as folk “boyfriend,” in quotes because I don’t know what the fuck to call him at this point, only to say that he’s my first thought in the morning and will be on a friendship level for life. This is because she gave me everything I needed in terms of girl power energy everywhere I looked. There is nothing hotter to me in this world than a woman with big dick energy.
Wow, it’s a good thing my feelings aren’t that intense.
So, it was no surprise to me that within days I was completely gone. I love her for everything she used to be, is, and will be. She has said it as no matter what, we have a past, present, and future. I really believed that until she didn’t tell me that the position of partner had been filled long ago, so I hoped too much that she was one of those women whose sexuality changed based on how much they felt demisexual/sapiosexual, not where they were on the Kinsey scale previously. It was a bad pattern to set up, because I’ve kicked myself over what I didn’t know for ten years, especially the part where my brain chemicals made backing down off that nerve scream in pain. I made myself a mixtape like a fucking child, and I will not apologize for going to that place, because acknowledging those feelings helped them go away faster, and I know it. It was easier to ask and move on than it was to pine for her, because I would have done it forever and I know this about myself. I’d be eighty years old without ever being vulnerable with anyone else. It’s not her, it’s the way my personality works.
I didn’t date for a long time, and the most vulnerable reason is that I didn’t want to make anyone else a priority over her. Sam would have been fucked, and now I know that. I couldn’t acknowledge it before, but my attention didn’t turn. I chose emotional intimacy over romance for years, which is why I felt starved of it after I fucked up everything. It came across as pouting that I’d been kicked out of the popular kids’ lunch table, because she was filtering it through her experience of dealing with younger people. Our age difference doesn’t show much, but that is where it pops up most in my humble experience. That feeling provoked comes from the heuristic that I’m so much younger, I’m using girlfriend tactics to goad and provoke her like she’s a senior jock and I’m a freshman.
I had that relationship when I was actually in high school.
I had enough emotional bandwidth to sit down at a table she prepared for me, at first filled with promise…. taking off the last silver cover to reveal absolute confusion……… when all I’ve ever wanted is to be her personal chef- for real, not a euphemism. I want to be a chef, and I wanted her to be my sous. I was working toward that goal by being emotionally vulnerable so that we both could heal and move on. But recognizing that we had issues didn’t come across as goading and provoking until she laid into me and I didn’t take the time not to respond with an absolutely proportional response because I was triggered too badly at being thought of as a nuisance…. and at the same time, it being held over my head that I wrote from a different perspective than what she was actually going through because I didn’t know what it was.
By the time she actually did it, she ended with being exhausted by everything. I thought, “no girl is worth this.” No girl is worth wrecking my life over, even if I do think she’s the face of God. If I left, I could use that without her. Through looking at her picture and telling it how beautiful she is, I could imagine her thinking the same thing even if she couldn’t say it out loud out of fear.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from the Bible, it’s “love people out loud.”
Stories That Are All True 